Horrid all with gold - Faerie Queene, Book 1, Canto 7

King Arthur shows up! It just took seven cantos to go from mere chivalric romance to Arthurian romance!

I'm going to hazard an allegorical reading here. As Duessa is the daughter of Deceit and Shame, I'm assuming that she's Duplicity. Certainly that fits in with her actions. And so Duplicity puts the soul into peril. Again.

Duessa leads the knight to a fountain that saps the strength. where he is attacked by

An hideous Geunt, horrible and hye,
That with his tallnesse seemd to threat the skye;

As he has drunk from the fountain, he's no match for the Giant, who the poem makes a pretty fierce opponent as it is. Luckily (I guess) for the Redcrosse Knight, Duessa pleads for his life suggesting tha that Orgoglio not kill the knight but,

But vanquisht thine eternall bondslave make

Which is a better than being

pouldred all as thin as flowre.

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Blogging the Faerie Queene - Prologue to Book One

What is a blog without a challenge?

For a number of years I’ve been meaning to read The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser’s unfinished but nevertheless lengthy Elizabethan poem. Some years ago, I bought a 1910 printing of The Works of Edmund Spencer. The poem runs 425 pages in fairly small type. I’m not sure how many cantos this thing runs to. (I'll tally them up later.)

Many years ago, one of my professors noted that when she was a grad student she studied with Lionel Trilling. She noted that he would assign some work, such as The Divine Comedy, as the weekend’s reading and then on the Monday seminar ask his students, “gentlemen, what kind of a book is this?” The answer was that this was a big book. This is a big book.

It is my intention to read through this "big book," and find something to say about each of the cantos (no matter how many there are).

I know that Spenser deals with Arthurian themes, which is why it has been on my reading list for years. After all, it’s not the only long allegorical poem I could be reading now. There’s always Piers Plowman, although that has the added difficulty of being in Middle English. I’m already aware of Spenser’s reputation for being deliberately archaic, nevertheless, I’ll toss my lot in with the sixteenth century.

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You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

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This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!